Edwin Brock (b. 1927). Born in London, Brock served two years in the Royal Navy. He was a police officer when he completed his first poetry collection, An Attempt at Exorcism (1959). Influenced by American confessional poets, Brock writes about family relationships, childhood memories, and sometimes shifts into the linguistic mode of an advertising copywriter (which he became in 1959).
Suggesting that all poetry is to some extent autobiographical, Brock argues "that most activity is an attempt ..